Hundreds of construction workers are on the job around the clock building Georgia’s energy future at Plant Yates, where they’re expanding a former 1950s coal power plant into a state-of-the-art natural gas powerhouse.

Georgia Power says it’s part of a massive multi-year expansion that will help them meet a surging energy demand as new data centers come online across the state, nearly doubling the power the company could produce.

“Yates is setting the stage,” said plant manager Robert Canning. “We’re trying to set equipment, we’re trying to assemble piping, we’re trying to run wires.”

Channel 2 Action News’s Michael Doudna went inside the construction site to see the technology driving the development.

Inside, construction workers are building emissions capture systems, power transmission infrastructure and carefully engineered support structures around the natural gas turbines at the center of the project.

Each of the site’s three massive Mitsubishi turbines weighs over 800,000 pounds and had its assembly finished in Georgia before a multiple day journey to Plant Yates in Coweta County.

“It’s probably about 10 times the size of a jet engine,” Canning said. “But the premise and the technology are very similar to it.”

In total, the three turbines will soon provide enough energy to power 1.3 million homes.

“We’ve been approved for about 5,000 megawatts of natural gas turbines,” said Matthew Kent, a spokesperson for Georgia Power.

But some opponents to the expansion worry about the environmental impacts and future costs to consumers if the actual demand from data centers falls short of Georgia Power’s projections.

“Folks think their bills are too high,” said Marqus Cole, the organizing director of Georgia Interfaith Power and Light. “They’re making decisions between rent and paying their bill, food and paying their bills.”

Cole’s group is just one of several suing the Public Service Commission over the nearly 10,000 megawatt expansion, which was approved last December. The expansion includes new energy production and new battery storage.

“There’s a lot of confusion,” Cole said. “A year ago, no one knew what the Public Service Commission was.”

The Public Service Commission is the elected body that regulates Georgia Power. In addition to setting the rates that appear on customers’ electricity bills, the commission also decides which parts of the cost to supply power can be used to profit.

The PSC allows Georgia Power to make a return on their investments in the grid, allowing them to charge customers for the cost of infrastructure like Plant Vogtle, where cost overruns ended up on household electricity bills.

Eventually, the buildout in the latest expansion will be part of that return on investment equation.

Georgia Power says rules passed by the PSC requires heavy energy users like data centers to be in a special customer pool. These rules require large energy users to pay for the power, from the infrastructure to the energy they use.

The utility provider says the agreements will allow them to provide “downward pressure” to prices for residential customers, letting them avoid passing on the bill like they had to with Plant Vogtle.

It would be a relief for current rate payers, who have seen price increases approved by the PSC six times since 2022 — if the demand actually pans out.

“Our response, like many Georgians, is that we don’t believe that,” Cole said. “We just keep getting told trust us, trust us. The numbers will come in, and what folks keep seeing over and over and over again is their bills are going up.”

The concerns don’t stop there. Because natural gas is a fossil fuel, environmental advocates worry that the multi-decade investment into natural gas plants will lock Georgia into a future of carbon emissions.

“It’s locking us out of an opportunity for the clean energy that Georgians want,” Cole said.

Kent told Channel 2 Action News that renewables like solar still have a part to play, pointing to power purchasing agreements and an investment in battery storage to accommodate renewable sources in the state’s energy mix.

Canning told us that natural gas offers advantages over renewables that help it succeed where they can struggle.

“It’s very flexible; we can turn it off, we can turn it on whenever we need to,” Canning said. “It’s a very valuable mix for resiliency and reliability in the system.”

With uncertain energy demands facing the company, that flexibility may be needed. Documents filed to the Public Service Commission last month show businesses have asked Georgia Power for more than 65,000 megawatts of potential energy demand by 2037.

The company expects only a fraction of that demand to materialize as projects like data centers are approved, but the exact amount the state will need is still up in the air.

Whatever the final need is, the company has an obligation to serve customers within its territory.

“We all know Georgia is the number one place to do business,” Canning said. And so, to do that, we need energy, and our customers expect it.”

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